The Monk and the Philosopher

fr The Monk & The Philosopher

Matthieu – My scientific career was the result of a passion for discovery. Whatever I was able to do afterward was in no way a rejection of scientific research, which is in many respects a fascinating pursuit, but arose rather from the realization that such research was unable to solve the fundamental questions of life – and wasn’t even meant to do so. In short, science, however, interesting, wasn’t enough to give meaning to my life. I came to see research, as I experienced it myself, as an endless dispersion into detail, and dedicating my whole life to it was something I could no longer envisage. At the same time I was becoming more and more interested in the spiritual life in terms of a ‘contemplative science’.

Jean Francois – But research in molecular biology over the last thirty years has been the field of some of the most important discoveries ever in scientific history. You could have taken part, but you didn’t.

M - Biology seems to have been doing fine without me! There’s no shortage of researchers in the world. The real question for me was to establish an order of priorities in my life. Increasingly, I have the feeling that I wasn’t using the potential of human life as well as I could, but that day by day, I was letting my life slip away. For me, the mass of scientific knowledge had become ‘a major contribution to minor needs’.

M - The goal of the sciences of what is reproducible, the hard sciences, is actually not to solve metaphysical problems, nor to give meaning to life, but to describe the material world as exactly as possible. To say that reality can be reduced simply to matter and that consciousness is just a property of the nervous system is no more a definition o f the context in which science operates. Contemplative life, too, has its own rules, and the deep conviction that comes from practicing it has, on the mind, as much impact as any experiment whatsoever that can be carried out in the material world.

M - true patience isn’t a sign of weakness, but of strength. It doesn’t mean to let everything happen completely passively. Patience gives you the strength to act correctly without being blinded by hatred and a thirst for revenge, which deprive you of any capacity of judgment. As Dalai Lama often said, true tolerance isn’t a question of saying. ‘ Come on, do me some harm!’ It’s neither submission nor resignation – it’s accompanied by courage, strength of mind and intelligence that keeps us from needless mental suffering and hold us back from falling into ill will.

M - ..it’s not at all a matter of cutting ourselves off from all human feelings, but of attaining a vast and serene mind which is no longer the plaything of our emotions, which no longer shaken by adversity or intoxicated by success. If a handful of salt falls into a glass of water, it makes that water undrinkable; but if a handful of salt falls into a lake, it makes hardly any detectable difference. Because of the narrowness of their minds, most people suffer pointlessly all the time from not getting what they want and having to face what they don’t want. Another source of suffering is self-centeredness. If you’re completely centered on yourself, the difficulties you encounter and the disquiet they cause you work directly against your well-being. You feel depressed and can’t accept such problems. On the other hand, if your main concern is others’ good, you’ll cheerfully accept whatever personal difficulties might be entailed in bringing about their good, because you know that others’ well-being counts for more than your own.

M - If we investigate our perceptions through contemplation and analysis, we’ll eventually stop believing in and being so attached to their substantiality. We’ll understand, for example, the ephemeral relatively of notions such as ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. Someone we see as enemy today might be greatly liked by other people, and in several months’ time may become the best of friends for us, too. Somehow, we have to train our minds in such a way that the solidity of our judgments, of our perception of both other people and inanimate objects, melts away like a block of ice melting into water. Ice and water are the same element, but whereas one is hard and brittle and you can break your bones on it, the other is soft and fluid. We can perceive the world as potentially hostile and divide it into what’s desirable and what’s undesirable, or else we can see it as a continuous process of transformation, ceaselessly changing and devoid of any true existence. We could even recognize in phenomena an infinite purity, synonymous with emptiness. These different ways of perceiving things make an enormous difference.

M - Attraction to novelty has one good side, and that’s the legitimate desire to discover fundamental truths, to explore the depths of mind and the beauty of the world. But in absolute terms, the novelty that’s always ‘new’ is the freshness of the present moment, of nowness, of clear awareness that’s not reliving any past or imagining any future.

The negative side of the taste for novelty is the vain and frustrating quest for change at any price. Very often, fascination with things that are new and different is a reflection of inner impoverishment. Unable to find happiness within ourselves, we desperately look for it outside, in objects, in experiences, in ever stranger ways of thinking and acting. In short, we get further away from happiness by looking for it when it simply isn’t to be found. The risk with that is that we may completely lost any trace of it. At the most ordinary level, the longing for novelty arises from an attraction to superfluity, which erodes the mind and disturbs its serenity. We multiply our needs instead of learning not to have any.

It seems to me that the notion of novelty, the desire to keep on inventing things through a fear of copying the past, is an exaggeration of the importance given to the ‘personality’ to the individuality that’s supposed to express itself in an original way at any price.

M - I’m not really so convinced that you have to try out everything before you can understand something’s value. Take the example of pure, fresh, thirst-quenching water. Someone drinking it can appreciate how good it is without having to taste all the other different sources of water to be found in the locality. It’s just the same with the joys of spiritual practice and its values – those who’ve tasted them don’t need ay other confirmation than their own personal experience. The happiness that flows from them has a strength and inner coherence that can’t be a lie.

M - I’m also not so sure that the freedom of choice in modern society is as wide as you’re assuming. This didn’t escape Dalai Lama, who said, ‘when you look closely at life in a city, you have the impression that all the facets of individual’s lives must be defined with great precision, like a screw that had to fit exactly in its hole. In one sense, you have no control over you own life. To survive, you have to follow that model and the rhythm you’re provided with’.